The Jealous Kind is an album about a remarkable artist at the peak of his creative gifts, a place where labels don't matter as much as the extraordinary power of his songs. "Knight seems like the last of a dying breed," wrote Rob Tannenbaum in The New York Times, "a hard-nosed iconoclast, a taciturn loner who hunts on his own land, a grownup Huck Finn with an acoustic guitar as well as a college degree. Chris Knight writes songs that place him in the company of Johnny Cash." The Boston Phoenix called him "a man in complete control of his creative faculties going against the roots-rock grain and toward a country spirit as an instinctive act of refinement."